Peter Molyneux is at it again with hyping up his next game as the greatest thing ever made
Calling Peter Molyneux a scammer is rather unfair. He does not set out to cheat you out of your money. He’s simply a game designer that once was one of most brilliant talents in the industry, trying to capture the muse again.
It is an undisputed fact that most of his recent projects massively over promised and undelivered. It’s an unfortunate truth that his claims cannot be trusted anymore.
That said, there is no malice behind it. Simply ambition that’s not matched by ability to deliver.
I keep hoping Molyneux will once again succeed in one of his projects. It would be glorious, and it would shift gaming landscape, just like his old works did. At the same time, I’m no longer expecting it to happen, and certainly not getting invested emotionally or financially in any of his promises.
(Molyneux or not, don’t pre-order by the way)
There’s the thing about “'Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.” But then there’s it’s corollary “any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.”
I’m other words, Molyneux should know better by now, and the fact that he clearly doesn’t can only come from a willful refusal to.
We can definitely debate the merits of the term scammer, but at this point it’s definitely undeniable that Molyneux is a liar. The Project Milo demonstration at E3 2009 is just a series of deliberate falsehoods, from the actor hired to behave as if she’s interacting with Milo improvisationally, to claims that Milo can identify subtle changes in human users’ moods by analyzing their facial expressions to the repeated claim that “this technology works now” even though the entire thing is pre-recorded.
If he wasn’t stating things like “This is true technology that science-fiction hasn’t even written about, and this works today, now,” you could pass it off as him just being enthusiastic about what they can achieve. But he openly and repeatedly stated that they had already achieved all of this, which he knew was not true. Again, we can say E3 or any other PR presentations are all lies on some scale–there’s kind of a line you have to ride in marketing where you present things in the best possible light–but Molyneux consistently steps way over that line by making obviously, verifiably false claims.
It’s easy to say there’s no malice behind it, but the fact is he’s a businessman selling a product, and it benefits him personally if people buy his product. He’s not some innocent childlike imp creature whose motives are always selfless, he’s a human being who likes money and is sometimes willing to say things that aren’t true to secure more of it. Is that “malice”? I don’t know. It’s at least “avarice”.
He’s a great developer and a shitty producer. When he’s in charge of his own projects there’s nobody holding him accountable and it just spirals into madness and then halfway through when all the hard and fun work of really designing the game is complete, and all that’s left is the boring business of production and finishing the damn thing, he just ADHDs off into the distance chasing the next cool idea/design challenge
Somehow he’s able to keep funding that arrangement, so it hasn’t changed.
